Meeting Liezl Hoving, yoga teacher from Namibia as well as an all round curious creative explorer and educator from Liezl Hoving Yoga. Liezl is passionate about helping people uncover their potential through yoga and using Bookamat to help her online classes grow.
From project management, qualitative researcher, kindergarten teacher, private chef as well as executive catering chef, Liezl can do it all! With this wide array of experiences, Liezl has been able to delve into the complexity and resilience of the mind and body.
‘Exploring new mediums of meaningful engagement’:
In August 2018 Liezl started focusing on refining her skills as a teacher while developing new training courses. She’s been using our Bookamat Class Streaming to engage with her clients on a deeper level.
We asked her a few questions that could be extremely helpful to a lot of Studios and teachers alike!
What was the first steps your studio took since the outbreak of the pandemic?
I’m a freelance teacher. I teach in several places and do a lot of workshops, courses and training. With the social distancing, all of these activities have been affected. Studios have closed and I had to cancel / postpone courses and it was a really heavy decision. My first thought was to offer something to these participants online, but then realised going online I could probably open it to an even wider audience. Together with my partner who is in the Netherlands we decided to start teaching online classes together.
Collaboration means we had access to a wider audience and it was less to carry in terms of admin and teaching individually. We started on Facebook in a private group as a way of testing the waters. Within the first week we were overwhelmed by manually taking care of all payments and clients. Additionally many people were not on Facebook. So we decided to move to a member management platform.
After investigating several, we decided on Bookamat as it was simple to set up and very affordable because you only pay for the members you have. We just had our first batch of clients use the booking system to access the online classes and it went super smooth!
Any tips on how you ensure your clients are still enjoying the classes through online streaming?
Any advice or motivation for studio owners going through tough times currently?
- Don’t be scared to try some new ideas
- Don’t be scared to change and improve if something doesn’t work
- Choose simple options when comes to tech and get support. There are many online forums and discussion at the moment.
- There are lot of learning curves at the moment, choose the ones that truly add value
- Don’t lose hope, people will seek out the in-person classes when this is overÂ
- You might also be surprised by the new options you uncover during this time!
